Eden Lost: Nin Andrews on the Pains and Rewards of Writing a Memoir About Her Father

In one version of my life, I grew up in a literary Eden. Raised on a farm, I was the daughter of an architect/horse lover and a Classics scholar/dairy farmer. My mother studied with Richard Lattimore in college and read the Greek myths and The Iliad and The Odyssey aloud at the dinner table.

My father taught us to paint and draw and took the family on Sunday tours around the University of Virginia and Charlottesville to show us Jeffersonian architecture, pointing out the white columns with classical molding, serpentine walls, and the octagonal structures that characterize his designs. He also showed us the blueprints for houses he designed. I used to imagine I was living inside his drawings.

Members of the local literati, my parents frequently entertained artists and writers. Among their famous dinner guests were James Dickey, William Faulkner, Peter Taylor and his wife, Eleanor Ross Taylor. Dickey was described by my mother as “that despicable man” after he tried to fondle her once when she was showing him her blue bird houses.

William Faulkner spent time in a cottage on our farm when he was teaching at UVA. He liked to ride our horses, but according to the farmhands, he was usually drunk. The horses came home without him. They would see Faulkner ambling across the fields on foot long after his horse returned.

Peter Taylor became one of my father’s closest friends in his old age, the two of them competing to tell the funniest stories about their southern childhood.

My parents hoped their children would become writers or artists. They loved all the things I love: books, art, music, animals, houses. Whiskey, too. “A taste for liquor,” my father liked to say, “is something important to have for the future.” I was the youngest of six siblings with whom I shared bedrooms, travels, riding, cow shows, and secrets.

By the time I was born, my parents were no longer interested in parenting. My mother hired a nanny who died when I was five, and then a long line of babysitters, some who lasted only an afternoon. My father joked that my mother would have happily sold me to anyone who happened up our driveway.  Finally, she just left me in the barn with the farmhands.

I was also born a sickly child with a severe case of strabismus, an eye disorder where you can only focus one eye at a time. The unfocused eyeball drifts as if unanchored, usually staring at your nose. No eye doctor in Virginia could treat me.

My mother found a research doctor in Boston. She dropped me off with him and/or his medical students at Boston Children’s hospital two or three times a year. My mother once said I had at least eight eye surgeries, but I suspect the number was more like five. They began when I was a year old.

In one of my early memories, I am lying beneath fluorescent lights in a hospital beds, wondering when my mother will arrive. Sick from the anesthesia, doctors and nurses hover around me. The doctor says in a low voice, “The patient almost died.” I lean over and vomit a stream of bile.

The nausea doesn’t leave me for weeks. I suffer from fever dreams and hallucinations as I float in and out of consciousness. In a recurring vision, Death, in the form of a large black bird hovers above me. Even when I get better, I see Death in the room with me. Something is wrong, I think. Why won’t Death leave me alone?

The death bird becomes a constant presence in my childhood nights. I see him for years and years—usually perched on my windowsill after dark, peering in at me. My parents don’t want me to talk about him. But I talk and talk—I tell everyone I can. I want someone to make him go away.

Once, when she thought I wasn’t listening, I heard my mother tell my father, “I’m afraid our daughter lives in a bird house,” meaning she suspected I was cuckoo. “She keeps talking about that giant bird she calls Death.” She added there was craziness in her family—her cousin, Bobby, suffered from visions, heard voices, and finally jumped in front of train. “Don’t worry. I’ll teach her not to embarrass us,” my father said.

My father believed in facades, or rather, in not telling the truth. He said good manners and pretensions are the secrets to a good life. He instructed me to behave like “a nice, ordinary young lady.” He believed in having a persona you sent out into the world, while the real you stayed safe at home.

A gay man, he worked hard to appear and act heterosexual, often cracking tasteless jokes about homosexuals, but he brought male “friends” to our house. He married my mother, not out of love, but out of convenience and for cover. On the autism spectrum, my mother was happy with their marital arrangement—she hated intimacy but wanted children.

To make her fit in, the wife he might want to have were he heterosexual, my father dressed my mother up in silky sheath dresses with pearls and bright red lipstick and insisted she join clubs like the Junior League, which she despised. But at home, she could be a dairy farmer who wore trousers and LL Bean boots and talked about bull semen at the lunch table.

In other words, my parents’ marriage was designed to look like a normal marriage, whatever that means, but was just a play performed for the world. My father was its author, director and costume designer. He told my mother (and his children) what to say and when and how, and more importantly, what not to say.

And whenever we went shopping with my mother, we bought clothes “on approval,” meaning my father had to decide if they were “aesthetically pleasing” or not.

My father had an array of opinions on style and fashion. When I became a teenager, he suggested I curl my hair to look like an upside-down tulip to downplay my large forehead and square jawline. I was never to wear knee-length skirts because I was built like a boy. Shorter or longer skirts, he said, create the illusion of a feminine form.

Whatever clothes or hairstyle I wore to town or school, I stripped off as soon as I returned home, wetting my hair and changing into baggy jeans and over-sized sweatshirts, becoming myself again. He also suggested I wear my glasses or sunglasses or never meet someone’s gaze when I was out in the world. At home, I could be a cross-eyed girl.

But I was never to talk about a bird called Death, not even at home. The less you talk about crazy things, my father reasoned, the less crazy you will be.

“You think I’m crazy?” I asked.

He shrugged and explained that a little craziness is common among writers and artists, but I shouldn’t advertise it. “You don’t want to invite the bird into our house,” he said. “Everyone knows a bird in the house is a bad omen.”

It wasn’t just the bird that troubled me. By the time I was a teenager, I had become seriously depressed. I was certain I wouldn’t live in this world for long. I stayed awake nights, contemplating suicide. This, too, was a secret my parents and I kept. Whatever troubled me, they insisted, “It will pass.”

Born in 1915, my father grew up as a gay child in Tennessee and North Carolina. Small, brainy, and asthmatic, he was pushed two grades ahead of himself. At school, he was teased and beaten up daily—his lunch stolen, his face rubbed into the asphalt.

His mother, ashamed of his effeminate ways, sent him to sports camps. She made him sleep on the porch in winter “to toughen up.” (It was believed back then that cold air made a boy stronger, or so my grandmother claimed.) His father needed money during the Depression and offered to sell him to his wealthy brother whose childless wife yearned for a son—but not a boy who loved lipstick and perfume and ladies’ shoes.

In World War II, my father enlisted in the Navy where he designed war ships, but he was kicked out for having an affair with an officer. After conversion therapy, he became a husband and a father of six children and, what he proudly called, “a regular pillar of society.”

When writing my memoir Son of a Bird, I dreamt my father was looking over my shoulder, watching me write from the other side. Again and again, he begged, “Please don’t tell that story.” Sometimes he was apoplectic. “How dare you write about your mother’s eccentricities and my boyfriends. You’re making me look like a sad sack.”

Other times he was disgusted. “Why do you need to air our dirty linen? You are exposing our family!” I don’t know if I believe in an afterlife, but if there is one, my father will not be happy to see me. Nor will my mother. But I didn’t write this book to expose anyone. I wanted to gain some clarity about my past.

Who is the girl in Son of a Bird? I still ask myself. Is she really me?  Should I have written another story, a happier one, about a girl growing up in a literary Eden?

Sometimes I wish I had. After all, I am so often asked at readings, How do you have the courage to write what you write? Are you ever embarrassed to read your work aloud? Don’t you worry what people will think? What about your children?

Yes, I am embarrassed sometimes. And yes, I worry. But usually I choose to be vulnerable rather than safe. To tell the truth, even if it’s not pretty. Even if I wish the truth were both safe and pretty.

In other words, I invite the bird into my house.

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Son of a Bird by Nin Andrews is available via Etruscan Press.